We thought we'd heard it all when we learned about Mary Hart Syndrome, in which certain Entertainment Tonight! viewers (specifically, an unidentified Indiana woman) suffered seizures triggered by the frequency of its perky host's voice. But this, from Yahoo! news, may take the cake:

"Hundreds of chickens have been found dead in east China -- and a court has ruled that the cause of death was the screaming of a four-year-old boy who in turn had been scared by a barking dog. The bizarre sequence of events began when the boy arrived at a village home in the eastern province of Jiangsu, where he screamed for a long time while bent over a henhouse window after being scared by the dog. A court ruled the boy's screaming was "the only unexpected abnormal sound" and that 443 chickens trampled each other to death in fear. His father was ordered to pay about $230 in compensation."